Obama: “We can’t cut our way to prosperity.” USPS: “Yes, we can!”

Normally people ought to avoid declaiming on things they clearly know next to nothing about, e.g., Phil Simms on holding calls.

Hey: I'm still a pig.

Yesterday President Obama, owner of the largest deficits in American history, sought to avoid the damaging political optics of the upcoming, automatic, deeply problematic “sequestration” cuts by instructing us all, “We can’t just cut our way to prosperity.” Rather, he insists on a “balanced mix of spending cuts and more tax reform” (read: higher taxes on more people and spending cuts that are as so much lipstick on a pig).

Two points:

1) How the heck would he know? When was the last time he honestly tried spending cuts as a means to spur economic growth? The engine that drives our economy—small business—is pleading for the government to get out of the way, shrink, stop growing, stop interfering, stop “investing,” i.e., try spending cuts. But they might as well be speaking Greek to this most profligate of presidents.

2) The sequestration cuts Obama derides these days were his idea. Back during the first debt ceiling face-off the sequestration cuts were proposed by the White House to force the sides to come to an agreement some time down the road—the cuts were intended to be so awful that both sides would have to compromise in their budgets. The score since then? The GOP in the House has passed budgets (plural) and sent them to the Senate, where they died for want of attention—they were left on a table to die like a baby that survived an abortion. The Democrat-led Senate hasn’t passed budget in something like four years now, and the President’s budgets (routinely late, when he proposes one) can’t even get a majority of Democrats to vote for them… who is actually trying to solve the problem here?

But that aside, at least one government agency (one that, not insignificantly, is forced to compete on the free market with private enterprises) says that it must cut costs in order to right its fiscal ship. The U.S. Postal Service has announced that it is ending Saturday mail delivery, a move that will save $2 billion every year.

Now, $2 billion per year only recoups two-tenths of one percent of the annual $1 trillion deficits this President insists upon, so it isn’t like this savings will save the republic.

And it’s not that the Postal Service has now become the sine qua non of fiscal responsibility, but hey, any glimmer of hope for sanity in government spending is, well, a glimmer.

The views expressed here are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of CatholicVote.org

About Author

Tom Crowe is a cradle Catholic with a deep love for and commitment to Holy Mother the Church, colored by a rather interesting life-long relationship with her. Born during the great liturgical upheaval of the 1970s, Crowe was brought up in a parish that continued using the Missal of 1962—the Traditional Latin Mass—for which he developed a love. Crowe learned the faith as a child from the Baltimore Catechism, and didn’t stop learning and wrestling with the Church’s teachings at his Confirmation. Through reading and many conversations with friends and converts far smarter than he, Crowe came to know, accept, and love the Church and what she proposes far more intimately. For three years these conversation took place in seminary before Crowe, with the blessing of the formation team, determined that seminary was not right for him. In the wild and humorous ways of God, Crowe landed on his feet in Steubenville, Ohio, where he manages the online presence for Franciscan University of Steubenville, where he also trains altar servers and is the head master of ceremonies for the Mass in the Extraordinary Form on campus.